Provinces as spoils, Damascus as barracks

A family of farmers - most likely in 2001 - in the vicinity of the Syrian border town of Ras al-Ayn tried to defend the crops on their land against a powerful individual seeking to seize it. Amira al-Rahawi, the wife of Muhammad al-Dabbo and a member of the family, was a close friend of my wife’s family. According to the family’s account, the assailant was the son of a senior security officer named Ibrahim Huwayja.

Amira’s husband was shot, but he was so preoccupied with taking his two brothers to the hospital that he lost a great deal of blood and died. His brother Hassan also died. Huwayja’s men pursued the third brother, Sabaʿ al-Dabbo, to the hospital, where they shackled him before taking him to a detention centre.

Hasakah, in north-eastern Syria, is among the richest of the country’s provinces in natural resources. It is one of Syria’s main producers of oil, wheat and barley, earning it the titles of the country’s breadbasket and oil reservoir. Under the two Assads, however, it was treated as a despised and distant hinterland. The region endured systematic neglect, demographic engineering and an oppressive security apparatus that relied on divide-and-rule tactics among its Arab, Kurdish and Syriac communities. 

In this sense, Hasakah offered a concentrated version of the Syrian dictatorship’s governing formula: a centre that plundered the provinces, intelligence services that guarded the plunder and a population rewarded for producing the country’s wealth with poverty. During the wheat and barley harvests, Mercedes cars belonging to officials would descend on Hasakah. The spectacle captured the voracity of a ruling clique that gradually evolved into a gang.

My colleague, the journalist Bassam Jaara, once told me of an incident from the 1980s. He had been invited to cover a military exercise attended by Rifaat al-Assad, Hafez al-Assad’s brother and the uncle of the deposed president Bashar. During the exercise, missiles were fired towards the Mediterranean. One officer, hoping to ingratiate himself with Rifaat, asked how many of those missiles it would take to destroy Hama. Rifaat rebuked him, most likely because such things were not to be said in public, rather than because the question itself was shocking.

Another journalist, Hussam Jazmati, recorded a similar account from a soldier who served during the same decade. The 138th Regiment of Rifaat’s Defence Companies had summoned a Russian expert to repair an armoured vehicle. The Russian noticed that the tank barrel was pointed towards Damascus, whereas military convention required them to face the enemy, meaning Israel. When his question was translated to Ali Deeb, the regiment’s commander, Deeb replied: “Tell him to go and f--- himself. We know who our enemy is”.

Jaara also recounted an episode involving Ibrahim Makhous, a senior Baathist and foreign minister under Salah Jadid and Nureddin al-Atassi. Speaking at the party’s Latakia branch in the late 1960s, Makhous reportedly argued that 100,000 people from the coastal mountains should move to Damascus to “protect the revolution”. Someone in the audience, grasping the sectarian implication, asked why the people of Damascus, or Sunnis more generally, could not protect it. Makhous replied that Sunnis were merchants rather than fighters. “What about the Christians?” another person asked. “They are soft”, he allegedly replied, "and incapable of fighting”.

For centuries, Damascus had received successive waves of newcomers who became part of its social fabric. Some established historic districts that still bear names such as al-Muhajireen, “the Migrants”, and al-Akrad, “the Kurds”. Under Assad rule, however, movement into and around the capital increasingly took the form of displacement and forced migration, part of a wider uprooting that eventually would affect almost half the country’s population.

After residents of the territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 war fled to Damascus and its outskirts, the term “the displaced” entered common use. Other waves followed, increasingly military and security-driven. Hafez and Rifaat al-Assad encouraged this process, as did Bashar in later years. The newcomers settled in areas such as Mezzeh 86, Esh al-Warwar and Qudsaya, creating informal belts around the capital like a bracelet. Beneath their haphazard urban appearance, these districts formed extensions of a political order founded on fear and armed loyalty.

Bashar al-Assad’s regime promoted “domestic tourism” as a tool for economic recovery and national cohesion, often through local festivals. It also encouraged religious tourism, which was widely understood in sectarian terms. As Shia militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan expanded their presence during the war, and as naturalisation and property ownership were used to entrench that presence, the process began to resemble political and social colonisation. In a striking paradox, Assad’s highly centralised state that proclaimed national unity and sought to impose a common political order instead generated deep estrangement among Syrians.

Travel between Syrian regions was subjected to wildly excessive security restrictions. Military and intelligence checkpoints became a kind of death lottery, leaving psychological scars from which few Syrians have escaped. I remember, by contrast, serving in the 1980s in an infantry brigade whose headquarters were in Khan al-Shih, near the front line with Israel. At one of the bus stops, it was common to hear the driver’s assistant call out to passengers: “Secret airport, anyone getting off?” The phrase neatly captured the absurdity of a country in which secrecy was proclaimed in public and everyone pretended not to recognise the obscene truth before them.

In a linguistically symbolic irony, Ibrahim Huwayja hails from a village called Ain Shaqaq - literally, “the Spring of Discord” - in the countryside of Jableh. Political and judicial bodies have accused him of involvement in numerous operations, the best known of which was the 1977 assassination of Lebanese leader Kamal Jumblatt. He has also been accused of participating in the repression in the city of Hama in 1982 and attempting to bring down an Israeli El Al airliner. These assignments appear to have qualified him for appointment as director of Air Force Intelligence in 1987, a position he held until Bashar al-Assad dismissed him in 2002.

Lebanese leader Walid Jumblatt described Ibrahim Huwayja’s arrest by Syria’s new authorities in March 2025 as “a vindication of justice” in the case of his father’s killing. Yet the incident also offers an occasion to recall the fractures running through Syrian and regional geography, which remain present in the intimate details of every Syrian’s life: in their longing for a justice that may never be achieved, and in the fears of other “provinces” that the past may return in new forms.